FEST: When I mentioned a new type of criminal, I meant the following kind of situation: there was a tendency after the war, both in Germany and in the allied countries, to demonize the leaders in the Third Reich. The Germans always saw these figures, from Hitler right down to Eichmann, as beasts from the depths and they possibly understood this as a way of creating a certain alibi for themselves. If you succumb to the power of a beast from the depths, you’re naturally much less guilty than if you succumb to a completely average man of the caliber of an Eichmann.
ARENDT: And it is much more interesting.
FEST: Really? Okay. The situation with the Allies was quite similar. In that case, they found a partial excuse for their lack of resolve, their appeasement policy up until 1939. And on the other hand, victory over this beast from the depths appears as much more glorious, when you’re dealing with the Devil incarnate.
ARENDT: The demonization of Hitler, in my view, was much more common among the Germans, including the German émigrés, than among the Allies themselves. In fact, the Allies were appalled, immeasurably appalled, to an unprecedented degree, when the truth came to light. This is underrated in Germany, to a catastrophic degree. I mean they were profoundly shaken, to the core of their being, when they learnt about it, when an ordinary soldier saw Bergen-Belsen and so on… I’ve experienced this in countless conversations. I’ve lived abroad—so I can tell you…
Well, demonization itself can help, as you’ve rightly said, to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you’re not guilty yourself. But above all… Look here, our whole mythology or our whole tradition sees the Devil as a fallen angel. And the fallen angel is of course much more interesting than the angel who always remained an angel, since the latter doesn’t even provide you with a good story. In other words, evil, especially in the twenties and thirties, played the role of ensuring that it alone had authentic depth, don’t you think? And then you get the same situation in philosophy—the negative as the only thing that gives any impetus to history, and so on. You can pursue this idea a very long way. And as a result, if you demonize someone, not only do you make yourself look interesting, you also secretly ascribe to yourself a depth that other people don’t have. The others are too superficial to have killed anyone in the gas chambers. Now I’ve put it like that deliberately, of course, but that’s what it comes down to. Anyway, if there was ever anyone who deprived himself of any demonic aura, it was Herr Eichmann.
FEST: Eichmann was actually such a small figure that one observer asked whether they hadn’t caught and put on trial the wrong man. And actually he wasn’t a cruel man—this emerges quite unambiguously from all the documents. Quite the opposite: he always found it difficult to do what he was instructed to do, and from the fact that he always found it especially difficult, he derived a feeling of worth.
ARENDT: Yes. That’s true, and unfortunately it’s very common. You think that you can judge what’s good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don’t mind me saying so. Brecht is always showing the temptation towards good as something that you have to withstand. If you go back into political theory, you can read the same thing in Machiavelli, and even in a certain sense in Kant. So Eichmann and many other people were very often tempted to do what we call good. They withstood it precisely because it was a temptation.
FEST: Yes, you’ve already indicated that the way we imagine evil, or the way evil is imagined and has been formulated in our culture, in religious, philosophical and literary terms, has no place for the type of man like Eichmann. One of the main ideas in your book—it already emerges from your subtitle—is the “banality of evil.” This has led to many misunderstandings.
ARENDT: Yes, look here, these misunderstandings actually run through the whole polemic, they belong to the small part of it that is genuine. In other words, it’s my view that these misunderstandings would have arisen in any case. Somehow, it shocked people enormously, and I can understand that perfectly well; I myself was very shocked by it, too. For me too, it was something for which I was quite unprepared.
Now, one misunderstanding is this: people thought that what is banal is also commonplace. But I thought… That wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t in the least mean that there’s an Eichmann in all of us, each of us has an Eichmann in him and the Devil knows what else. Far from it! I can perfectly well imagine talking to somebody, and they say to me something that I’ve never heard before, so it’s not in the least commonplace. And I say, “That’s really banal.” Or I say, “That’s not much good.” That’s the sense in which I meant it.
Now, banality was a phenomenon that really couldn’t be overlooked. The phenomenon expressed itself in those frankly incredible clichés and turns of phrase that we heard over and over again. Let me tell you what I mean by banality, since in Jerusalem I remembered a story that Ernst Jünger once told and that I’d forgotten.
During the war, Ernst Jünger came across some peasants in Pomerania or Mecklenburg—no, I think it was Pomerania (the story is told in Strahlungen[‡]), and a peasant had taken in Russian prisoners of war straight from the camps, and naturally they were completely starving—you know how Russian prisoners of war were treated here. And he says to Jünger, “Well, they’re subhuman—and […] like cattle! It’s easy to see: they eat the pigs’ food.” Jünger comments on this story, “It’s sometimes as if the German people were being ridden by the Devil.” And he didn’t mean anything “demonic” by that. You see, there’s something outrageously stupid about this story. I mean the story is stupid, so to speak. The man doesn’t see that this is just what starving people do, right? And anyone would behave like that. But there’s something really outrageous about this stupidity. […] Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing, right?
FEST: Would you say that Eichmann, and Höß[§] too, are specifically German figures? You mentioned Kant just now, and Eichmann himself occasionally referred to Kant during his trial. He’s supposed to have said that he had followed Kant’s moral precepts all his life long, and made Kant’s concept of duty his guiding principle.
ARENDT: Yes. Quite an impertinent remark, of course, isn’t it? On Herr Eichmann’s part. After all, Kant’s whole ethics amounts to the idea that every person, in every action, must reflect on whether the maxim of his action can become a general law. In other words… It really is the complete opposite, so to speak, of obedience! Each person is a lawgiver. In Kant, nobody has the right to obey. The only thing that Eichmann did take from Kant is that fatal business of inclination.[‖] And this is, unfortunately, very widespread in Germany. This curious concept of duty in Germany… I’ll say this to you: Look here, Hitler or sadists such as Boger in the Auschwitz trial,[a] Hitler was probably just a murderer with murderous instincts. In my opinion, these people aren’t typical Germans.
‡
a
Wilhelm Boger, a police commissioner and concentration camp overseer, was infamous for his brutality while serving in the political department at Auschwitz. He was tried in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1965 and sentenced to life imprisonment.